Oakland Schools Poised to Part Ways With Superintendent Just as State Oversight Ends

Oakland’s school board is prepared to part ways with its superintendent of schools before the end of her term during a vote Wednesday night, according to a board member.

The news comes as the embattled Oakland Unified School District, which Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell took over on the brink of financial insolvency in 2017, is set to take final steps to exit state receivership this summer following 22 years of state debt and oversight.

“This should be a celebration, but at the same meeting now the school board is trying to force out the leader who got us to this point,” board member Mike Hutchinson told KQED.

An item on the board’s closed-session agenda Wednesday night involves the final steps necessary to separate from Johnson-Trammell, according to Hutchinson. The move would follow discussions about Johnson-Trammell’s employment at board meetings over the last month, which had raised conflicting reports about whether she was being pushed out early.

Johnson-Trammell signed a three-year contract extension in August that would have had her oversee the district until the end of the 2026–2027 school year, though she had always planned to step back from heading its day-to-day operations this spring.

In a statement sent by the district after news of the superintendent’s potential departure initially broke earlier this month, Board President Jennifer Brouhard said that discussion of ousting Johnson-Trammell was “premature.” She did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

Johnson-Trammell, an Oakland native and a former student and teacher in Oakland Unified classrooms, took the helm of the district amid a financial crisis — a position she has come to know well during her eight-year tenure. All of it has been under the watchful eye of the state since the district was bailed out of bankruptcy by California in 2003.

Between declaring bankruptcy and the start of Johnson-Trammell’s term, the district had nine different superintendents or state administrators.

“In the eight years since, [Johnson-Trammell] has led the district, and installed the systems that are digging us out of those financial challenges,” OUSD said in a statement Tuesday announcing its exit from receivership.

“Since she became superintendent … Johnson-Trammell has had fiscal vitality and organizational resilience as two of her top priorities for the district, and that has led us to where we are today,” the district’s statement continued. “She understood from personal experience in Oakland how financial instability undermines our efforts toward student success.”

Johnson-Trammell’s first budget as superintendent required $9 million in cuts. Since then, the district’s budget has been squeezed by continued enrollment declines, a higher-than-advisable number of small schools and significantly increasing teacher wages.

Although the district said Tuesday that it has made considerable progress toward fiscal stability, recent budget planning hasn’t been smooth sailing.

In December, the district certified its first negative budget in more than 20 years, indicating it could run out of cash to pay its bills in the next two years.

Hutchinson said the district would be in a bad spot if it loses Johnson-Trammell, whose top budget staff could leave with her.

“We know other senior staff will follow her out the door without a plan in place or replacement in place,” Hutchinson said.

An independent audit of the district’s finances, another step toward exiting receivership, found that the district is operating about 30 more school sites than is fiscally responsible and needs to increase its administrative efficiency. Still, it credited Johnson-Trammell and her budget team’s sustained leadership as the primary reason for the district’s progress.

Hutchinson worries that losing this stable team, without qualified candidates ready to take over, could make the district’s independence short-lived.

“We could potentially leave receivership on June 30th and get put right back in on July 1st if we don’t have a superintendent and leadership in place that [can] manage our decisions going forward,” he said.

OUSD still has a deficit of $70 million for the current academic year. It’s whittled down next year’s deficit, which was projected in December at $95 million, to $12 million after factoring in a laundry list of service cuts and layoffs. Those will be reflected in the budget presented later this spring, by whoever steps in as interim superintendent should Johnson-Trammell leave.

School sites’ discretionary funds, individual supplies and community agency contracts, and capacity for overtime pay are all on the chopping block after the board approved a significant menu of cuts presented by Chief Budget Officer Lisa Grant-Dawson in the fall.

While these cuts reduced next year’s expected shortfall, the district is still planning to spend more than it brings in each month. Nearly half of the projected savings from the budget-balancing solutions will be one-time savings, so further cuts will likely be necessary in the future.